A New Numerical Scheme for Cosmic Ray Transport

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel numerical scheme for cosmic ray transport that is stable, accurate, and computationally efficient, overcoming previous limitations caused by artificial diffusion and enabling advanced astrophysical simulations.

Contribution

The authors develop a new explicit algorithm for cosmic ray transport that handles streaming and diffusion without artificial smoothing, with linear scaling and perfect parallelization.

Findings

Successfully tested with anisotropic streaming and diffusion scenarios.

Demonstrated stability and accuracy in shock and blast wave simulations.

Enabled complex cosmic ray physics modeling in galaxy and cluster simulations.

Abstract

Numerical solutions of the cosmic-ray (CR) magneto-hydrodynamic equations are dogged by a powerful numerical instability, which arises from the constraint that CRs can only stream down their gradient. The standard cure is to regularize by adding artificial diffusion. Besides introducing ad-hoc smoothing, this has a significant negative impact on either computational cost or complexity and parallel scalings. We describe a new numerical algorithm for CR transport, with close parallels to two moment methods for radiative transfer under the reduced speed of light approximation. It stably and robustly handles CR streaming without any artificial diffusion. It allows for both isotropic and field-aligned CR streaming and diffusion, with arbitrary streaming and diffusion coefficients. CR transport is handled explicitly, while source terms are handled implicitly. The overall time-step scales linearly with resolution (even when computing CR diffusion), and has a perfect parallel scaling. It is given by the standard Courant condition with respect to a constant maximum velocity over the entire simulation domain. The computational cost is comparable to that of solving the ideal MHD equation. We demonstrate the accuracy and stability of this new scheme with a wide variety of tests, including anisotropic streaming and diffusion tests, CR modified shocks, CR driven blast waves, and CR transport in multi-phase media. The new algorithm opens doors to much more ambitious and hitherto intractable calculations of CR physics in galaxies and galaxy clusters. It can also be applied to other physical processes with similar mathematical structure, such as saturated, anisotropic heat conduction.